The domestic dog has lived alongside humankind for many thousands of years, and in that time has undergone extensive selective breeding that has altered both morphology and behaviour. Our close relationship with dogs may to some extent be characterised by inter-specific communication, but this communication may lead to both understandings and misunderstandings. This thesis looks in part at how inter-specific misunderstandings may arise in the dog-human dyad, and how we may be able to both minimise misunderstandings and maximise understandings through our behaviour, the choices we make in training and husbandry practices, and the associations we expose dogs to. Also explored is dog personality, how this can be measured, and what measures of dog personality may mean for the health and welfare of individual dogs as well as patterns in behavioural tendencies. This is explored by way of a personality survey as well as with a cognitive bias task. Cognitive bias in animals has been investigated in recent years as a possible objective measure of positive and negative welfare by measuring the direction (positive or negative) of judgement bias – which refers to whether ambiguous signals are interpreted as predicting a positive or a negative outcome. Interpretation of cognitive bias results was explored and an index of judgement bias developed. The possible applications of a judgement bias index in conjunction with arousal to look at the role of emotional state on operant training procedures is also discussed.

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